AMD

AMD
Information
Type	Public company
Industry	Semiconductors
Founded	May 1, 1969
Founder	Jerry Sanders
Headquarters	Santa Clara, California, United States
Notable Personnel	Lisa Su (Chair and CEO)
Products	Ryzen CPUs, Radeon GPUs, EPYC server processors, Instinct accelerators, semi-custom SoCs
Website	https://www.amd.com

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American semiconductor company that designs central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and system-on-chip products. It was founded on May 1, 1969 by Jerry Sanders and a group of colleagues from Fairchild Semiconductor, and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Its CEO and chair is Lisa Su, who was appointed president and CEO in October 2014.

AMD is one of the two main suppliers of PC-VR-class graphics hardware, alongside NVIDIA, and its Radeon GPUs and Ryzen CPUs are common in the PCs that drive tethered headsets such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. The company also designs the semi-custom processors inside Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox consoles, including the systems that host PlayStation VR and PlayStation VR2, and it published the LiquidVR software development kit to reduce latency in VR rendering on its GPUs.

Company background

AMD was incorporated in 1969 and built its early business on memory chips and processors, competing with Intel through the 1980s and 1990s, in part as a second-source manufacturer of x86 processors. In 2006 it acquired the graphics chip maker ATI Technologies for about 5.4 billion US dollars, bringing the Radeon graphics brand into the company. AMD spun off its manufacturing plants into a separate foundry company, GlobalFoundries, in a process announced in 2008, after which AMD became a fabless designer that outsources chip production. In February 2022 it completed the acquisition of Xilinx, a maker of field-programmable gate arrays, in a deal valued at roughly 50 billion US dollars.

Under Lisa Su, who joined in 2012 and became CEO in 2014, AMD returned to competitiveness with its Zen CPU architecture (sold as Ryzen for consumers and EPYC for servers) and the RDNA and CDNA GPU architectures. For the first quarter of fiscal 2026 the company reported revenue of about 10.25 billion US dollars, reporting results across a Data Center segment (5.78 billion US dollars), a Client and Gaming segment (3.61 billion US dollars, of which gaming was 720 million US dollars), and an Embedded segment (873 million US dollars). AMD described data center and AI infrastructure as the primary driver of its revenue, while gaming revenue rose year over year on demand for Radeon GPUs, partly offset by lower semi-custom (console) revenue.

VR and AR relevance

Radeon GPUs for PC VR

Rendering for a head-mounted display requires drawing two views, one per eye, at a high and steady frame rate, which makes the GPU the most demanding component of a PC VR system. AMD's Radeon graphics cards have been listed among the qualifying GPUs for mainstream tethered headsets. For the original Oculus Rift, guidance has cited the Radeon RX 470 as a minimum and the RX 480 as a recommended option, with cards such as the Radeon R9 390X and R9 Fury listed for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift S. Newer Radeon parts in the RX 5000 and RX 6000 series have also been described as suitable for headsets including the Valve Index and HTC Vive Pro 2.

AMD positioned the Radeon RX 480, its first card based on the Polaris architecture, as a way to lower the cost of entry to VR. The company announced the card at Computex on May 31, 2016 with a starting price of 199 US dollars and around 5 teraflops of compute, marketing it as bringing VR capability that it said was previously common in 500-US-dollar GPUs. In that announcement AMD framed the card as a way to expand the addressable VR market, noting that only a small fraction of the world's PCs at the time had the graphics power to run headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

LiquidVR

LiquidVR is a software development kit that AMD introduced for its Radeon GPUs to address the rendering problems specific to VR. AMD's graphics chief technology officer Raja Koduri announced it at the Game Developers Conference during the week of March 3, 2015. The SDK is a Direct3D 11 interface that gives applications access to GPU features useful for VR.

LiquidVR groups several techniques. Asynchronous Shaders bring a subset of the asynchronous compute capability of Direct3D 12 into Direct3D 11, which is used for hardware-accelerated time warp (re-projecting a rendered frame to the latest head position just before display, to reduce perceived latency). Affinity Multi-GPU lets an application direct rendering calls to one or more GPUs, for example assigning one GPU per eye. Latest Data Latch lets the GPU pull the most recent head-tracking data asynchronously from the CPU to cut sensor latency. Direct-to-Display bypasses the operating system to send rendered frames straight to a headset, a path exposed only to headset vendors rather than to applications. Later additions documented by AMD include motion estimation for asynchronous spacewarp, Vulkan interoperability, and TrueAudio Next for GPU-accelerated audio. The LiquidVR runtime is distributed with current AMD drivers, with the latest listed release being version 1.0.3.20.

AMD applied LiquidVR in its professional graphics line as well. In March 2016 it released the Radeon Pro Duo, a dual-GPU card it marketed with LiquidVR for VR content creation.

Semi-custom console chips and PlayStation VR

AMD operates a semi-custom business that designs processors to a customer's specification, and its largest semi-custom customers have been the game console makers. Both Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One (2013) used AMD APUs built around the company's "Jaguar" CPU cores combined with Radeon graphics. AMD executives have credited the PlayStation 4 contract with providing revenue that helped the company through a difficult period and funded development of its Zen architecture. Because the PlayStation 4 is the host platform for the original PlayStation VR headset (released in 2016), the AMD chip in the console performs the rendering for PSVR titles.

The PlayStation 5, released in 2020, is built on a custom AMD system-on-chip with eight Zen 2 CPU cores running at up to 3.5 GHz and a GPU based on the RDNA 2 architecture with 36 compute units, reaching about 10.28 teraflops, alongside 16 GB of GDDR6 memory; the GPU includes hardware ray tracing. The same console hosts PlayStation VR2 (released February 2023), so the AMD SoC drives that headset's twin OLED displays at up to 120 Hz. PSVR2 uses eye tracking to enable foveated rendering, a technique that renders the area the user is looking at in full detail and reduces detail in the periphery; in a presentation by Unity at the Game Developers Conference, eye-tracked foveated rendering on the headset was reported to lower GPU frame time substantially, cutting one demo from 33.2 ms to 14.3 ms, about 3.6 times faster. Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Series S consoles also use semi-custom AMD Zen 2 and RDNA 2 SoCs, though those consoles do not have a VR headset.

Current status

As of mid-2026 AMD remains an independent, publicly traded company led by Lisa Su, with data center and AI products as its largest source of revenue and gaming and semi-custom graphics as a smaller segment. Radeon GPUs and Ryzen CPUs continue to be among the hardware used to run PC VR, and AMD-designed SoCs continue to power the PlayStation 5 and Xbox consoles, including the PlayStation 5 platform behind PlayStation VR2.